John Brown learns from his adult sons…

John Brown learns from his adult sons in the Kansas territory that their families are completely unprepared to face attack, and that pro-slavery forces there are militant.

Determined to protect his family and oppose the advances of pro-slavery supporters, Brown leaves for Kansas in 1855, enlisting a son-in-law and making several stops just to collect funds and weapons.

Born in Connecticut in 1800, Brown can trace his ancestry back to seventeenth-century English Puritans.

He had moved about restlessly through Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, barely able to support his large family in any of several attempted vocations: tanner, sheep drover, wool merchant, farmer, and land speculator.

Having become involved in the abolition movement during his recent years in Springfield, Massachusetts, Brown had left in 1850 to settle with his family in an African American community founded at North Elba, Essex County, New York, on land donated by the New York antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith.